I saw a cartoon this week online of Charlie Brown sitting with Lucy at her psychiatrist booth with a quote saying, “It takes a long time to understand nothing.” It’s not clear who is saying this bit of wisdom, but we have to assume it’s not Lucy, right? Lucy always seemed to be quite clear that she has the right answers. And she’ll tell you all about it. For 5 cents!

No, it’s not Lucy. Charlie Brown is the one who is acutely aware of his inadequacies and that’s why we’re always rooting for him. Whether we want to admit it, we all get his feeling of not being enough.

But this quote, in my humble opinion, was likely from an older and wiser Charlie Brown than the one we have had the opportunity to meet in the comics. Charlie Brown is mostly someone who is aware of his limitations and struggles with it. He’s not necessarily embracing that he doesn’t understand things. He wants to know the meaning of Christmas, to get the right tree, to kick the football right, and to have the curly-haired girl fall in love with him.

He wants to win in the world.

He also knows that this is harder than it looks, even though it seems easier for everyone else than it is for him. But he still wants in:

• Into the circles of popularity
• Into a sense of accomplishment
• Into an assurance of his own worthiness

So, this quote, “It takes a long time to understand nothing.”, is a quote that would likely come from an older and wiser Charlie Brown who perhaps eventually did achieve all that he wanted to achieve. Once he did, then he might have seen that all that he wanted in the beginning was never the answer that he was looking for. Not really.

When we’re young, we are busy learning how to be successful in the world. And we’re celebrated for all of those achievements, as we should be. After all, this is the season of graduations, weddings, confirmations, and all these things that mark the progression of our days. It’s exciting and so fun to be a part of these milestones. We’re so thrilled to celebrate your confirmation with you Lily! Today is a good and important day!

But what we also learn as we grow older is that the answers for the longings of our hearts are not necessarily out in the world. We do not find our human condition resolved from getting the right grades, the right job, the right spouse, or any of the other things we think will fix the problem of ourselves.

Our fears and worries about how we don’t measure up, or our anxiety about not doing life “correctly” can still haunt us. So, after we’ve tried all the things, eventually we will likely come to a point where we might say along side Charlie Brown, “It takes a long time to know nothing.” It can take a long time to figure out that no matter what you do in life, you’re still just you. Maybe you’re “you” in fancier circumstances than before, but inside your head, you’re still just Charlie Brown in a world that maybe feels like it is not designed for Charlie Browns.

Albert Einstein was quoted as saying something very similar. “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I do not know.” Now, he was likely talking about the universe and physics, but we could easily say the same thing about life. As we live, we come to realize that the rules of how the world is “supposed” to work doesn’t always work. Horrific things happen to good people. Innocent children suffer. Our ideas about doing all the right things in order to have a good life don’t always work out. Somehow young people die for no good reason when Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones is still going strong. Nothing against Keith Richards being alive, but isn’t he the poster child for rock and roll lifestyles that “should” end your life young. And here he still is.

The rules do not hang together and so the more we learn, the more we realize we just don’t know things. Reality is bigger, grander, and more perplexing than our expectations and ideas of how it all should go. We cannot perform or achieve our way to a good life.

Now, this could sound like horrible news, particularly if you’d like a fail-safe set of steps for safety, fulfillment, and happiness. And who’s not looking for that on some level. But, here is the good news. We are not in charge of generating our own wisdom. God is. We can receive the wisdom of the Holy Spirit and that is what this day of Pentecost celebrates.

God is our source of wisdom. It’s not up to us. The beginning of true wisdom in our lives is the moment we realize that this is so. The beginning of wisdom is the moment we realize that we are, in fact, Charlie Brown. When we admit we don’t and can’t know all the things. When we put up the white flag and acknowledge we will never be enough, according to the rules of the world, because it’s a game you cannot win.

It takes a long time to know nothing. It takes a long time to see the vastness of what we don’t know and realize that we will never know. In that moment, we are freed to stop the hustle of trying to exert our own power and turn to God. In Christ, our Charlie Brown-ness is enough, beloved, and precious. In Christ, our world that is full of struggle and imperfection is also enough, beloved, and precious. That’s not to say that our world and lives are without limitations. Surely, we are limited. We struggle. We grieve.  So much of our reality may feel desperately lacking. But we do not need to transcend our limitations to find a place of rest in Christ.

Beloved child of God, as you are in this moment, you are sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked with the cross of Christ forever.  

The promise of grace and redemption is given. It’s done. So, we can take a deep breath and let those anxieties go.

When we do, what do we notice?

When we lay down our worries about ourselves, our lives, our salvation, our beloved-ness, what do we see?

What we can hear, see, and experience in the absence of our own spinning fears, judgements, and worries is the world that the Lord God made. To quote Louis Armstrong, we see “trees of green, red roses too, I see them bloom for me and you…”

We can see the emergence of new life all around us. We can see reasons to be hopeful. We can experience the nudgings of the Holy Spirit in our lives, in our hearts and minds, when we are quiet enough in our internal worlds to see and hear the call of the Spirit.

We see that God’s creation is still unfolding. The kin-dom is on its way and we are a part of its creation. It’s an extraordinary thing to participate with the whole world “groaning in labor pains,” as Paul writes in his letter to the Romans. We wait in hope for the fullness of God’s creation, which is both here and yet still unfolding.

We need not worry about our own selves, as Charlie Brown has famously done forever. We get to just be as we are, as goofy as that may be. It’s all good. The people in the Acts stories were all speaking their own languages and it was beautiful. The languages of their homes. We don’t have to fit a mold, to be a certain way to “win” in life. In Christ, that work is just done. So, for you, Lily, who is taking the step of confirmation today, I hope you hear this message of hope for you. I hope we all hear it, because when we can lay down our personal worries of whether we belong, we can more clearly hear the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We can lay down our nets that may keep us trapped when Jesus tells us to follow him. We can never care again whether or not we successfully kick the football when Lucy is holding it for us. It becomes a non-issue and we are set free. And with that freedom we can participate in the labor pains of our gorgeous world coming into the fullness of its beauty with God. We can serve. We can be extravagant in our love. We can look reality in the eye with peace in our hearts so that we can get busy doing God’s work bringing the kin-dom into its full fruition in our world here. That is indeed good news for all us Charlie Browns.

AMEN